How do you measure a year? As straightforward as this seems, it is a truly personal question to each of us. What comes to mind? Life, weather or seismic events, loss or gains, . . .   Read More

Is it possible to preserve and read memories after someone has died? Robert McIntyre thinks it is, and that the technology is closer than most people realize. His company Nectome is working on documenting the physical properties of memory formation, and studying ways to preserve those physical properties after death. McIntyre has already won . . .   Read More

The future is a kind of history that hasn’t happened yet. The past is a kind of future that has already happened. The present moment vanishes before it can be described. Language, a human invention, lacks the power to fully adhere to reality. We live in a very short now and here, since . . .   Read More

Fred Lyon is a time traveler with a camera and tales to tell. At 95-years-old, this former LIFE magazine photographer and fourth generation San Franciscan has an eye for the city and stories to match. We showed photos from Fred’s books San Francisco, Portrait of a City: 1940-1960 and . . .   Read More

The ambition to think on the scale of thousands, millions, even billion of years emerged in the 19th century. Historian and author Caroline Winterer chronicles how the concept of “deep time” has inspired and puzzled thinkers in cognitive science, art, geology (and elsewhere) to become one of the most 
influential ideas of . . .   Read More

As the world is becoming more technologically connected, finding time for oneself and face-to-face connections is becoming increasingly difficult.  Many of our talks at Long Now have aimed to help expand our collective now by centuries or even millennia, but what about our personal present?  Tiffany . . .   Read More

Creators of AI systems have a responsibility to figure out how they might go wrong, and govern them accordingly. . . .   Read More

When cretaceous-age rocks in the Southern US eroded over millions of years, they produced a uniquely rich, fertile soil that landowners realized was ideal for growing cash crops such as cotton. It was the soil from these rocks that slaves toiled over in the era of American slavery—and the same ground that . . .   Read More

Author Neal Stephenson discusses the controversial ending to Game of Thrones and why endings are generally so hard to nail in works of fiction.

From the Neal Stephenson Conversation at the Interval, “Fall, or Dodge in Hell.” Watch the full video here. . .   Read More